Your ether won't show up until Mist has finished syncing. Ignore the elapsed time of 47 years - you've never downloaded any blocks, so it's showing time since the epoch. First thing to do would be to check that your Mac's clock is correct. Then check both your Mac and home router are allowing traffic on ports 30301 and 30303...
– Richard HorrocksFeb 14 '17 at 16:39

5 Answers
5

The ethers will not appear in your account until you have downloaded the blockchain to the block number containing your transaction. Let the blockchain sync.
You can use --fast --cache=1024 for faster downloading the blockchain. Refer How can I get a geth node to download the blockchain quickly?.
If you want to use your ethers urgently, you can use platforms like MyEtherWallet to import your private keys. But it's up to you if you don't want to trust a third party, better wait and let your blockchain to sync completely.

Thanks Bokky. I thought my Mist wallet account went amiss. As this is my first time using the Mist wallet app, the syncing process has taken longer than expected (more than 1 hour) and it is still in process. If there is an alternative method to use/send the amount of ETH that was deposited in my Mist wallet, please let me know. I tried importing the private key of my Mist wallet account using MyEtherWallet, but it was not successful to unlock the wallet (taking a long time in processing).
– suburhokMay 12 '16 at 21:58

Only after completing sync will Ethereum Wallet 0.8.7 display your accounts and your balance. I waited for sync to complete (literally days); then finally it displayed my account names and addresses, balances and total balance.

Transactions and balances will not show up (or show up incorrectly) in Mist until it is fully synced. Essentially, without syncing, the wallet user interface cannot display what has happened as it doesn't yet know that it has happened. It gets all its data from the blockchain.

So, if you sent 1 ETH to a wallet that you are viewing in mist on April 1st, but the blockchain is only synced up to December 1st, Mist doesn't know that the transaction as happened yet and believes the balance is 0.

Additionally, if you sent 1 ETH from your mist account to another one on April 1st, but it is only synced to December 1st, the interface may still show you have your original balance, when you actually have 1 ETH less than your current balance.

Thanks Tay. If there is an alternative method to use/send the amount of ETH that was deposited in my Mist wallet, please let me know. I tried importing the private key of my Mist wallet account using MyEtherWallet, but it was not successful to unlock the wallet (taking a long time in processing).
– suburhokMay 12 '16 at 22:05

You can access your Mist wallet in MyEtherWallet. Find the keystore directory via accounts -> backup -> accounts and select that UTC-..... file on MyEtherWallet. Both Mist and MyEtherWallet are just accessing an account. You can use both clients to access and send the same account via the private key (the keystore file).
– tayvanoMay 12 '16 at 22:46

You need peers to download the blockchain. You can wait for Mist to find peers, or you can add them manually. This page has an example. For this to work, you should either replace your .ethereum/static-nodes.json file with this one, or start Geth with the following parameters: